Something happened to Win Butler between the September 2004 release of the Arcade Fire’s debut, “Funeral,” and the March 2007 release of the Canadian band’s sophomore album, “Neon Bible.”

Butler got really famous.

That doesn’t mean Butler is a rock star, constantly being spotted and harassed in his hometown of Montreal. He is quiet, awkward man with a frail voice, but he is a powerful songwriter with the presence of an emotional steamroller, Talking from a coffeehouse there earlier this week, ahead of the Arcade Fire’s Red Rocks appearance Monday night, Butler said his existence in the thriving artistic metropolis remains quiet and calm, just as he likes it.

“Maybe once a month, somebody comes up and says, ‘Hey, I like your band,”‘ Butler said. “I don’t think people give a (expletive) here. For most of the French-speaking population, they’ve never really heard of us. Or maybe they heard our band’s name when we opened for U2 or something, but we’re not a part of the fabric of the culture.”

It’s not that Butler and his many bandmates walk the streets anonymously or unnoticed. Surely the denizens of Montreal’s hipster neighborhoods know all of the Arcade Fire by name – just as well as they know the indie rock collective’s chamber-driven compositions. The Arcade Fire is one of the top bands in indie rock. Its thoughtful, sweeping music forces people to action. The band makes songs of revolution and songs of mourning. And no matter the tone, you can’t help but feel it deep inside your rib cage.

The Arcade Fire started playing rock clubs while supporting the release of its debut album, but it wasn’t long before the band was playing festival main stages – and eventually headlining everything from Coachella to Central Park’s Summerstage, the latter of which had David Bowie joining the band for a couple of songs.

The Arcade Fire has become such an international draw because the band has a way of connecting with fans in an uncomfortably intimate manner. The shows are lively and upbeat and emotionally sweeping. Many fans choose to sing along with Butler’s everyman narrative, and seeing entire groups of people losing their composure and breaking into tears is not unusual.

It helps that the band plays as a sometimes-elegant, sometimes-exuberant seven-piece, with members switching among piano and accordion and violin and the hand-held cymbal. They sometimes climb stage supports, using parts of the venue as part of their creative and musical palette.

“Whenever we’ve played live, we’ve always tried and communicate the songs,” said Butler. “It’s very much determined by the songs.”

Butler shares the songwriting duties with his wife, band co-leader Regine Chassagne, but his songs make the bigger impressions. He chose music over his first loves – photography and filmmaking – because he needed something he could do without planning, he said.

The records Butler connects with the most are the ones that document a certain time or place, and his “Neon Bible” certainly follows that philosophy. Some of the darker songs on the record – including “My Body Is a Cage” and “Black Mirror” – were the first ones written, during the marathon touring for “Funeral.” But after the band returned home and the members acclimated to their post-tour lives, a process that took six months, Butler said, brighter songs emerged, including the dramatic “Intervention” and lively “The Well and the Lighthouse.”

“I don’t listen to our records that much, but I feel I can hear the times we went through in that recording,” Butler said. “Music is about trying to put across where you’re at and expressing something. My favorite Neil Young record is ‘After the Gold Rush’ … ‘Harvest’ has these amazing songs and this amazing production, but there’s something really direct about ‘After the Gold Rush’ – and you could tell that he was in a different place.”

Ricardo Baca is the editor of The Cannabist. After 12 years as The Denver Post's music critic and a couple more as the paper's entertainment editor, he was tapped to become The Post's first ever marijuana editor and create The Cannabist in late-2013. Baca also founded music blog Reverb and co-founded music festival The UMS.